The jaguarete is better spelled with an accent acute over the last ‘e’ like this: jaguareté. This means it should be pronounced: jaguareteh as in saying ‘eh you’ or ‘Eh? What’s this?’. I don’t believe that it should be capitalised … Continue reading →
The Javan tiger is extinct but its close neighbour the Sumatran tiger is not (estimated 441 to 679 individuals as at 2008). The Javan tiger’s scientific name is Panthera tigris ssp. sondaica. The islands of Java and Sumatra are separated … Continue reading →
Henry Bergh is known as the person who perhaps did more than any other in America to improve animal welfare as he founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in April 1866. It was three … Continue reading →
The illustration comes from The History of Reynard the Fox. In this 15th century woodcut, we see Tybert the Cat castrating a village priest. Incidentally, “Tybert” is spelled in two other ways, namely ‘Tibert’ and ‘Tybalt’. Unusually, there is absolutely … Continue reading →
In a famous Indian fable in the Panchatantra, an ancient collection of animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose from 200 BCE-300CE, the domestic cat is portrayed as sly, underhand and hypocritical. The fable which I describe below is immortalised … Continue reading →
This is a topic that interests me: how artists of the mediaeval era depicted domestic cats in their paintings. And I’m sure that they felt that they were painting an accurate representation of the domestic cat before them. But by … Continue reading →
It is sad and telling of modern life that the famous place where the first wildcats were domesticated by farmers, the Fertile Crescent, which encompasses Syria and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, is now a place where there are no … Continue reading →
First things first, there is a difference between cat-haters and ailurophobes. The latter have a fear of cats which might lead them to hate them but it might not. The former genuinely detest cats for whatever reason. The reason for … Continue reading →
It seems that “scaredy-cat” first appeared in print as “fraidie-cat” (fraidy-cat). The two sayings having very similar meanings. And they’re both based on the fact that domestic cats are often frightened of strangers. A person is described as a scaredy-cat … Continue reading →
Yes, there is a common ancestor to the cat and dog. If you believe in evolution as set out by Charles Darwin in his work “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection…” you will believe that there … Continue reading →
